She was the first doctor in R.I. to get coronavirus. Now she’s on a mission to understand it and fight it Dr. Aakriti Pandita started feeling a tickle in her throat soon after she got back to Rhode Island from a trip to Colorado in late February. She didn't think much of it at the time. Probably allergies. Then, just as the tickle started to go away, a fever started to spike. She had night sweats, chest pressure, shortness of breath. Her sense of smell went haywire -- like something was rotting.

This was unlike any other pneumonia she'd ever experienced. It was a mystery, but one she was remarkably suited to unravel: She's an infectious diseases fellow at Brown University and works at Lifespan hospitals with patients who have things ranging from staph infections to HIV. "This is not just a normal bacterial pneumonia or viral pneumonia," the doctor thought to herself. "This is more than that."

When the more dramatic and bizarre symptoms developed, she had a suspicion about what was ailing her: COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. But by the time Pandita got back from Colorado, nobody in Rhode Island had tested positive yet. Restaurants were still full. People were going to shows at PPAC and college basketball games at the Dunk. Her first doctors were skeptical even as she pressed to get a firm diagnosis. She persisted, though, and was able to get a test. She went early in the morning of March 9 to a drive-thru site at Rhode Island Hospital, where she often works, and had a swab stuck unpleasantly far up her nose. The call she got that night was no surprise. She had COVID-19.

"I knew it!" she said. By then, only three people in the state had tested positive. Pandita was the first person in Rhode Island to test positive without a history of international travel or face-to-face contact with a known COVID case. She was also the very first healthcare worker to test positive, announced simply by the Department of Health as an unnamed Rhode Island hospital worker whose infection was still under investigation. Back then, there were few enough cases that they could be described in specific detail. Eventually, the state would announce hundreds a day, and eventually, Pandita would treat many of them.

Pandita, 31, now sees a pandemic that has upended daily life from two distinct perspectives: As a patient who'd get winded by the walk from her bedroom to the bathroom, and an infectious diseases specialist who became curious, even obsessive, about the malady that once ailed her.  David DelPoio Rhode Island Hospital Dr. Aakriti Pandita, an infectious diseases fellow, was one of the very first COVID patients in the state. She talks about her experience with the disease as a patient, first, then a clinician. [The Providence Journal / David DelPoio]

So she's able to speak from experience when she tells her patients that there's light at the end of the tunnel. There was for her, too. But she was able to advocate for herself in a way that others could not. "It was an unsettling question for me: How many cases did we miss in those early days because of our lack of understanding of this disease?" she said. Doctors like Pandita are now working on filling those gaps. She's involved in clinical studies on investigational drugs for COVID. She can't talk much about what the research will show, but she helps enroll patients, follows them as they are treated, and tracks them to see whether the treatments are working.

Pandita got into the infectious disease specialty because she likes to ask these sorts of questions. She likes to do puzzles and read Sherlock Holmes. She's a fiction writer in her spare time, and she sees her specialty as a sort of storytelling, a cerebral branch of medicine. Pandita's own story began in Delhi, where she grew up. Her dad was a physician, a general practitioner, and she'd often see him care for people with infections you wouldn't see in the United States. From a young age, she was her dad's helper.

She went on to medical school in Kashmir, an area marked by conflict between India and Pakistan. It was not uncommon to spend months inside a dorm because of lockdowns and curfews, she said. They'd eat mostly rice and lentils for months in isolation. "These things just felt like a way of life back then," she said. "You just get used to it." She came to the United States by way of a medical residency in upstate New York, then pursued a fellowship in infectious disease medicine at Brown. A fellowship is a sort of super-specialty, learning all the ins and outs of a particular area of medicine -- everything from blood infections to staph infections to antibiotic-resistant infections, or, in rare cases in Rhode Island but common elsewhere, tuberculosis.

Pandita has been in Rhode Island for the past two years for her fellowship. Soon she'll leave for Colorado, where she'll become an attending physician and move with her husband, a radiologist who lives in California. That trip to Colorado in February was in preparation for her move out there. It also might be what got her sick. That's one of the strangest things about Pandita's whole COVID experience. She likes to know how people got infected. In her own case, she's not sure.

It's fair to say that the airport or the plane might have been the culprit. It's also pretty well-established by now that COVID was circulating in society more in February than was realized at the time. She had plenty of time to mull it over when she was sick, isolated at her home in Riverside. She lives there by herself, without any family nearby. Her husband would check in on her by telephone, and they talked about whether she would have to call 911 at some point. This isolation was difficult. It even brought back memories of medical school -- although this was much easier. Within a few days, Pandita started getting better, and she never had to call 911 or go to the hospital. Her fever broke. Her symptoms abated. She tested negative twice for COVID and got back to work.

And immediately entered a brand-new world. Because now, COVID had taken over: Everyone was wearing masks, for one thing. And it was all COVID, all the time. The infectious disease doctors start with a meeting -- now via Zoom -- talking about their most challenging cases. They'll get consulted on most coronavirus patients in the hospital, helping decide what kind of care they'll receive. When she sees a patient, she can empathize like few others. It's not just the physical symptoms, which can vary from headaches to the runs. They are isolated in hospitals. Because of visitor restrictions, they can't have any family with them in person. It's the same dilemma she faced in Riverside. She knows how tough it can be.

"That changed me as a clinician," she said. She wonders, too, if things might have been different if infectious disease medicine had gotten its proper due. Would the world have been more prepared if her specialty got the right funding and attention? People can tend to think that infectious diseases are a developing world problem, Pandita said. Ebola in Africa, or SARS in Asia. "Pandemics like this, it really reminds us that we need more work in the fields of infectious diseases," Pandita said. "It shouldn't end with, 'OK, fine, we got through this pandemic, let's forget about it.'"

For now, everyone's playing catch-up. But there are a lot of people working, especially infectious disease specialists like Pandita, on finding some sort of solution. The results of their research should be out soon, and Pandita is excited about sharing it. "It's difficult, and it's mysterious," she said. "But it won't be mysterious for that long. I think it's just a matter of time before we figure it out." bamaral@providencejournal.com